Sunday Read: Spiritual Impatience and God's Slow Work

Moses spent forty years as an Egyptian prince, then forty years as a shepherd in Midian, before God called him at age eighty to lead Israel. That's eighty years of preparation for forty years of ministry. Abraham waited twenty-five years for Isaac's birth. Joseph endured thirteen years of slavery and imprisonment before his dreams were fulfilled. David was anointed king as a teenager but didn't take the throne until he was thirty. God's timeline rarely matches our expectations.

We live in an instant-gratification culture that has infected our spiritual expectations. We want microwave sanctification - quick, easy, painless transformation. We expect rapid answers to prayers, immediate resolution to struggles, fast-track spiritual maturity. When God works slowly, we assume he's not working at all. When seasons stretch longer than we anticipated, we interpret delay as denial.

But God is never in a hurry, and he's never late. He operates on eternal timelines, not earthly calendars. What seems like wasted time to us is often essential preparation to him. The Israelites wandered forty years in the wilderness not because God couldn't get them to Canaan faster, but because he was transforming slaves into a nation. The delay was the preparation.

Jesus understood this principle when he waited four days before going to Lazarus, deliberately allowing his friend to die so that greater glory could be revealed through resurrection (John 11:6, 15). When Mary and Martha complained "if you had been here," they were measuring God's goodness by their timeline. Jesus was operating on a better schedule - one that would display God's power more magnificently than simply preventing death.

Paul learned this lesson through his Damascus road experience. After his dramatic conversion, we might expect immediate ministry launch. Instead, he spent three years in Arabia (Galatians 1:17-18), then several more years in relative obscurity before his missionary journeys began. God was doing deep work that required time - transforming a Pharisee into an apostle, reshaping pride into humility, redirecting zealous energy into gospel mission.

What season are you impatient to end? What prayer feels like it's taking too long to answer? What process seems unnecessarily slow? God isn't wasting your time - he's investing in your transformation. The farmer doesn't dig up seeds daily to check their progress; he trusts the underground work happening in darkness and waiting. Your character is being formed, your faith is being tested, your soul is being shaped for purposes you can't yet see. Trust God's timeline. His delays are not denials, and his slow work is often his best work.